Art Exhibition

Ahron Weiner on the Verge: Bringing "The Flood" to Brooklyn

Filed under: Art

There were breaks in the rain, but the day ended with small rivers flowing through the gutters in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. It was the last day of Armory week in New York City, an event consisting of art fairs all over the city, ranging from colossal reputations and incredible valuations to emerging artists eager for their first tastes of success and notoriety. I was on my way to the Verge show, itself spread out over several locations.

If you want to find something unique or unusual, Verge is the place to go. You'll have to sift through a lot of good efforts (as opposed to successful results), but the one piece that blows your mind is worth it. I found it at 20 Jay Street: "The Flood," by Ahron Weiner.

There is nothing conventional about Weiner's photography, except, perhaps, for the fact that he uses a camera. After that, he's truly exploring new territory. "The Flood" is part of a larger effort that tells the stories of the Old Testament through rehabilitated advertising images.
Okay, that's a lot to digest. So, let's step through the concept.

If you ever see a tall (by my standards, at least) man with long blond hair chipping through the advertising posters on Manhattan scaffolds, there's a good chance it's Weiner. These posters are slapped up all over the city, with the new simply covering up the old ... and so on. It's endless. Weiner goes in the opposite direction. He peels away at the layers, looking for a story to emerge. Starting with what strikes him as an interesting advertisement, he pulls to see what lies beneath.

Gallery: "Cycle of Violence" at the DUMBO Arts Festival

Tags: Art Exhibition, art fair, art fairs, Art Gallery, art show, artist, Artists, brooklyn, new york, new york city

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ArtWeLove: A Great First Step for Aspiring Art Collectors

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

When I first started writing about the art market, in the white-hot auction climate of the summer of 2007, I had the chance to interview Prof. Michael Moses of NYU. Co-founder of the Mei-Moses Index used to gauge the direction of art prices, he's pretty much the de facto source for issues at the intersection of art and investing. I'll never forget the advice he offered to my readers: start with prints of your favorite pieces, and as you can afford to, replace them with the real thing.

This is the exact concept I saw in action when I stopped by the ArtWeLove booth at the Affordable Art Fair to visit company founder Laurence Lafforgue.

Art We Love focuses on making works by high-caliber artists available to entry-level collectors. The archival pigment prints offered by the company are limited-edition reproductions of museum-caliber pieces from well-known artists who have agreed to work with Lafforgue to make the art luxury attainable to a broader constituency.

Tags: affordable art, affordable art fair, affordable artwork, art collecting, art collection, art collector, art exhibit, Art Exhibition, art exhibits, art fair, art market, art show, artist, Artists

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"Earth Leak": Art Brings Disaster to Manhattan

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

As I walked the aisles of New York's Affordable Art Fair this past weekend, hoping to meet artists who'll someday become the mainstays of the auction scene, a powerful installation stopped me dead in my tracks. Black paint dripped from a white orb, which was suspended above a pile of once-white everyday household items. A milk carton and shoe, among other things, slowly turned black, as did the map of the world upon which they rested. An entanglement of pipes spread out from the dirtying action, and a quiet man sat on the floor beneath one of them, looking content and relaxed.

So, I had to interrupt his piece.

This is how I met Kamol Akhunov, the artist responsible for "Earth Leak". Inspired by the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Akhunov's installation drives home the message that a disaster thousands of miles away can affect our daily lives, as suggested by the black paint falling upon the pile of household goods, as well as the map beneath them.

Gallery: Earth Leak at the Affordable Art Fair

Artist Kamol Akhumov with Earth Leak at the Affordable Art Fair

Tags: affordable art, affordable art fair, affordable artwork, art exhibit, Art Exhibition, art exhibits, art fair, art show, artist, Artists, artwork, gulf of mexico, Gulf of Mexico oil leak, Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Gulf of Mexico spill, manhattan, new york, new york city, oil, oil spill

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Bank Of America Showcases Western Art

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Events, Art

Last month I wrote about an exhibit featuring Bank of America's contemporary art holdings in Charlotte. Should you be interested in seeing the works of another artist in the B of A holdings you'll need to travel to Kansas City, Missouri. That's where the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will be presenting Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection from September 25, 2010-January 9, 2011. The exhibit showcase the work of the Baltimore portraitist who in 1837 was invited on the adventure of a lifetime, tagging along with Scottish nobleman Captain William Drummond Stewart and the American Fur Company expedition on a six-month adventure to the Rocky Mountains. They trekked along the Oregon Trail to the annual gathering of the fur trade and Miller was one of the first American artists to bring the images of the American West to vivid life.

The exhibit shows 30 works on paper not seen in the public since 1964. Miler made more than 100 field sketches during the expedition, sketches that became the inspiration for at least a thousand paintings and watercolors. The six-month journey set him up for the next three decades as he received commissions for albums of watercolors and full-sized oil paintings that he produced in his studio. The works from the Bank of America Collection represent intermediary work based on his field sketches and done in preparation for the commissioned work.

"We are thrilled to share Miller's work with the general public," said Margaret C. Conrads, Samuel Sosland Senior Curator, American Art, at the Nelson-Atkins and curator of the exhibition. "Viewers will find that fact mixes with fantasy to reflect life on the frontier both as it was and as it was imagined to be."

After debuting at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art the exhibition will head to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2011.

[via Art Fix Daily]

Tags: american west, art exhibit, Art Exhibition, art exhibits, bank of america, museum exhibit, museum exhibition, nelson-atkins museum, western art